Recent content by Atomhawk Chris

  1. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    I asked this question to Steph McGowan, one of our extremely talented Senior Concept Artists and she said outside of the classic brush, the masking tool is hands down her favorite tool: "Being able to add transparency or to erase parts of a layer without actually erasing the contents of that...
  2. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    The vision for the look and feel of the game was driven by the team at Firaxis. It’s fair to say that Chimera Squad has carved out it’s own distinctive look within the XCOM universe. At Atomhawk, one of the most interesting challenges relating to the style was how to replicate the look at...
  3. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    The team at Firaxis had a very clear vision for the game. It has a fantastically pulpy look which references comics, graphic novels and Saturday morning cartoons. It’s totally appropriate for the tone of the game and the rag-tag Chimera Squad, so we were really happy to work to this unique...
  4. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    Atomhawk focuses exclusively on the creation of art content, so there's no programming involved on our side I'm afraid! In my past game development positions the programming teams have used C++ when building games in Unreal Engine and C# when building in Unity, but I'm not a programmer so I...
  5. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    Great question! I’ll tackle this in two parts: For any project, large or small, the preparation phase is key. Having a clear brief and vision is typically the foundation of fun, constructive and creative projects. More often than not that vision comes from our clients and typically comes in the...
  6. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    Our artists primarily use Adobe Photoshop for 2D painting/illustration and Blender for any 3D work. While there are still times artists may need to use some other specialist software to get the job done, the above packages are what the majority of our Concept Artists are using on a day to day...
  7. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    One of the great things about Atomhawk is that you get to work on so many different projects across a wide range of styles/genres/platforms etc, that there's always something cool going on! On that note, some of my favorite recently completed projects at Atomhawk include the likes of "Age of...
  8. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    Good question! We very much operate as one Atomhawk and share visibility on everything coming in and happening across the company, but the most important factor when planning new projects is artist suitability. If a project can be tackled within one studio that's great, as it allows the art and...
  9. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    That's awesome - thanks so much for checking out our work and supporting us :)
  10. Atomhawk Chris

    Atomhawk Vancouver Studio Director AMA

    Great question! A lot of concept artists do prefer to work in darker conditions, as any sort of glare on their screens can make creating and assessing their work a lot more difficult. We've just moved into a brand new studio here in Vancouver that is set up to provide a lovely dark environment...
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